Is Ricoh Circling the Drain?

June 23, 2017

While Toshiba’s financial troubles have been front page industry headlines, Ricoh news has only recently come to light as to how much trouble they are in. It’s hard to hide the massive layoffs, or selling all your “down the street” business to your Dealers. This has been a boon to many local dealers, not just Ricoh Dealers, as they hire some very talented Sales people. The stories they tell is that no one’s job is safe at Ricoh. That kind of uncertainty makes Ricoh not a good place to work! It’s Sink or Swim Time for Ricoh!

But this is what happens when you sales organization is focus solely on Market Share and not profit. It has proven to be an unsustainable practice. According to the article in the URL link above “President and CEO Yoshinori Yamashita in the middle of April began visiting Ricoh’s sales outlets in Japan, the U.S. and Europe, urging senior officials to pursue profits instead of more market share.” But this will take a culture change in your Sales Force. If you have trained your sales people to “give it away” and always be the lowest price than that is the only way that they know how to sell. Simply asking them to stop doing that and focus on selling for profit doesn’t train them on how to sell for Profit. It is a tall order. Time will tell if they can actually shift their sales focus. But if they don’t the future of Ricoh is bleak! Yamashita went on to say “We will incur a loss of tens of billions of yen three years from now if nothing is done,” he said. “People around me warn that our survival will then be questioned.” So yes, Ricoh is circling the drain (More Evidence of the Big Crunch). Whether or not they go down the drain will be determined by how well their sales force makes this transition to selling for profit.